Nicola Ramazzotto

This paper advances a pragmatist redefinition of what counts as art by re-articulating the relation between art and aesthetic experience. Drawing primarily—though not uncritically—on John Dewey's Art as Experience, I argue that the artistic emerges in continuity with the broader aesthetic field of experience, yet acquires a more determinate configuration within it. The argument unfolds in two movements. First, I reconstruct the pragmatist expansion of the aesthetic beyond the confines of a fixed “system of the arts” and identify three structural traits of aesthetic experience: situated expressiveness, qualitative salience, and a demand for form. I also revise Dewey's emphasis on consummatory closure by reframing aesthetic unity in terms of a demand for form rather than its necessary achievement. Second, I turn back from aesthetic experience to art and propose an adverbial and emergentist account of artistic specificity. Artistic experience is characterized not by intrinsic properties, fixed media, or ontological conditions, but by operative thresholds internal to experience: conscious undertaking, material and formal selectivity, and communicative-critical reach. The proposal is situated in dialogue with Danto, Dickie, Levinson, and Weitz, clarifying points of convergence while defending a naturalistic and non-essentialist alternative. The conclusion reinterprets the “system of the arts” as a retrospective and evaluative mapping of artistically operative practices rather than a prescriptive taxonomy.

Il saggio riconsidera il rapporto tra l’estetica pragmatista e la concezione tradizionale dell’estetica come filosofia dell’arte. Nella prima parte introduce la distinzione tra “storia” e “preistoria” dell’estetica, sia in senso generale sia all’interno del pragmatismo, ricostruendo il paradigma moderno dell’estetica come teoria dell’arte e le ragioni per cui Peirce, James e Dewey evitarono la locuzione “estetica pragmatista”. La seconda parte esamina la nascita dell’estetica pragmatista con il “battesimo” operato da Shusterman, mettendo in luce la sua funzione s-definitoria, con cui l’estetico viene liberato dal vincolo dell’arte bella e spinto oltre i confini disciplinari della filosofia. La terza parte propone infine un modello emergentista per ridefinire il rapporto tra estetica pragmatista e arti, distinguendo il modo in cui l’esperienza estetica emerge dall’esperienza quotidiana e il modo in cui l’esperienza artistica si differenzia ulteriormente dall’esperienza estetica.

My aim in this article is to briefly reconstruct the reception of Dewey's _Art as Experience_ and more generally of his aesthetics in Italy. In order to do so, my contribution will be divided into three parts, corresponding to the three editions that Dewey's book has had in Italy. In the first part, I will trace the early influences and the debate with Benedetto Croce, showing the "idealistic encirclement" suffered by Dewey's aesthetics, which led to the first Italian translation of Dewey's book in 1951. In the second part, I will trace the influence of Dewey's aesthetics from 1951 to 2006, showing first the Marxist and Catholic critiques, then the first tentative attempts at a reinterpretation outside the idealist domain, and finally the second edition of _Art as Experience_ in Italy 1995. The third part considers the renaissance of Dewey's aesthetics in Italy after Giovanni Matteucci's new translation in 2006 and Luigi Russo's work in 2007. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Dewey's significance for the contemporary Italian aesthetic debate and an attempt to identify a specific Italian interpretation of Dewey's aesthetics that can be traced in the effort to bring Dewey into dialogue with other authors of the modern aesthetic tradition.

In this paper I address the relationship between Hegel and Heidegger from the perspective of the dialectic between end and beginning. After the introduction, in the second part of the paper I analyze Hegel’s position in the history of being as the beginning of the end of metaphysics. Afterwards I address Heidegger’s interpretation of the beginning of Hegel’s Logic, showing how the essential beginning is the end of the completed system. In the fourth part of the text, I discuss how Heidegger wants to position himself in relation to Hegel, mainly examining their different interpretation of negativity and initiality. I will argue that the key word for understanding their different positions is “event”. Whereas Hegel’s system leaves no room for any beginning as event, but every beginning is reabsorbed by the finished and concluded system, for Heidegger thought must time and time again make itself initial and evential.

This paper attempts to investigate Kierkegaard’s thought through the category of mimesis. First, two meanings of the word are distinguished and analyzed: the archaic meaning that links it to the concept of re-enactment, and the traditional meaning that links it to the aesthetic field of art. These two meanings are then considered in relation to Kierkegaard’s opus, showing the oscillation of mimesis as corresponding to that between the aesthetic, which lives in fantasy and in the unfulfilled possibility, and the religious, which finds its identity in the imitation of Christ and in the transparent relationship to God.

This article aims to investigate the possibility of a dialogue between Dewey and Heidegger, in particular on the role art plays in establishing horizons of meaning. After a brief introduction where the possibility and appropriateness of such a dialogue is justified, the first chapter investigates Heidegger and Dewey’s interpretation of the difference between the aesthetic experience of the ancient world and the modern world: while in the modern world art is locked up in museums and excluded from the affairs of life, in the ancient world it was at the center of the experience of meaning. In the following section, the ability to create horizons of meaning is identified as the possibility for art to become central again in the modern world. To argue this, the two key terms of horizon and meaning are investigated, showing the many points of convergence between Dewey and Heidegger’s theories. In conclusion, the argument is drawn to a close, showing both the important similarities and some fundamental differences between the two aesthetic theories of Heidegger and Dewey.

The purpose of this paper is to address Rorty’s critique of Dewey’s notion of experience and to reaffirm a view in which the call to experience is indispensable for a genuinely contingent philosophy. In the first part, I analyze Rorty’s critique of Dewey and show its inconsistency. In the second part, I draw a comparison between their aesthetic views and argue that a true aesthetic experience must consist in the cultivation and creative transfiguration of situational resistances. In the third part, using Jane Addams as an example, I illustrate how at Hull House the resistances provided by the situation were transfigured into original and meaningful aesthetic experiences that touched people’s lives and allowed for a meaningful and intelligent reconstruction.